AR piston conversion

was thinking about converting my colt ar to a piston. are the conversion kits on the market any good? the kits that i've seen seem easy to install, and denny from anoother site swears by them. the only problem i see is trying to mill out my yhm free floating forearm to fit the piston assembly. any comments are welcome!

The cheapest piston conversion I've seen is the aires kit and its $400. The POF upper looks good but its $1400 by itself. I'm gonna wait till the price comes down before I switch one of my ar15s over to a piston setup.

Correction, the gas piston upper is made by Ares Defense and its called the GSR-35. Ares used to make flashlight guns and they made a pretty innovative folding machine gun called the FMG that folded up into a box the size of a cigarette carton. It was in the movie robocop. They also make the Shrike ar-15 belt fed upper. I've considered buying the gas piston upper but it seems like a bit of a waste since I have yet to have an jams with my ar in the couple thousand rounds I've shot from it. Of course I take better care of it than a soldier is able to.

Ares Defense, thats them .. they also make a $400 conversion kit that includes a new bolt carrier and a piston setup that replaces your gas tube. Another site did a write-up on it and showed how to do the installation. It looked very simple to convert over. Basically swapping carriers after removing the gas rings, putting a bushing in the gas tube hole in the receiver, driving the gas tube roll pin out and removing the gas tube, then put the piston setup in and replace the gas tube roll pin. All of this is done with no modification to the gun and can be switched back should you want to. I'm with PJM204 in that my ar15s run fine and I cant justify the price tag. But then again I don't drag them through mud, dirt or sand and my butts not on the line when I'm punching holes in paper.

The AR-18 design was built but never took off since the AR-15 design was "contract locked" by the gov't and as such couldn't really be altered. This design was of course bought and sold by Armalite as Armalite AR-180. The design was also imitated in the HK SL-8/G-36 and XM8 systems, the Enfield SA-80 bullpup rifle used by the Brits. That the SA-80 has problems is already known, but the gas system has never been identified as a problem on the SA-80, unlike the other parts of the rifle. I'm pretty sure there are other designs that use the AR-18 piston design but I'm not recalling them at this time.

You may note that HK is adding an op-rod kit to existing M4 rifles for the
US gov't in addition to the "new" HKM416 complete rifles. I read an Army Times article just a few weeks ago that large-scale production isn't going to happen and the "clean your rifles" blame is still going to the soldiers

Check these out:

LR-300
-----------
- this company is really proud of their rifle. They have that AR-18 style op rod in their M-16 upper for a few years now:

- remember this one? This is the one that helped get 7.62x39 AP ammo added to the "no AP pistol ammo allowed in the US" list. I really am hesitant to list them because their attitude from the letters I read was "we have no control over the government, we're just here to sell guns" and were really ambivalent about the whole AP ammo ban BS. At any rate, it is/was a piston-operated design.

You missed one!

Originally Posted by hcpookie

Some info about op-rod "upgrades" for M16 style rifles...

The AR-18 design was built but never took off since the AR-15 design was "contract locked" by the gov't and as such couldn't really be altered. This design was of course bought and sold by Armalite as Armalite AR-180. The design was also imitated in the HK SL-8/G-36 and XM8 systems, the Enfield SA-80 bullpup rifle used by the Brits. That the SA-80 has problems is already known, but the gas system has never been identified as a problem on the SA-80, unlike the other parts of the rifle. I'm pretty sure there are other designs that use the AR-18 piston design but I'm not recalling them at this time.

You may note that HK is adding an op-rod kit to existing M4 rifles for the
US gov't in addition to the "new" HKM416 complete rifles. I read an Army Times article just a few weeks ago that large-scale production isn't going to happen and the "clean your rifles" blame is still going to the soldiers

Check these out:

LR-300
-----------
- this company is really proud of their rifle. They have that AR-18 style op rod in their M-16 upper for a few years now:

- remember this one? This is the one that helped get 7.62x39 AP ammo added to the "no AP pistol ammo allowed in the US" list. I really am hesitant to list them because their attitude from the letters I read was "we have no control over the government, we're just here to sell guns" and were really ambivalent about the whole AP ammo ban BS. At any rate, it is/was a piston-operated design.

Thanks philapino18 for starting the thread and thanks everyone for the info.

I have searched for gas piston uppers and could only find the POF $$$ so 400 is a little pricey but I can see paying it, I sat and tried to figure out how to do this myself which wasted a WHOLE lot of time and they did the foot work and took a chance on blowing themselves up so I think with the parts included that it aint bad.